On March 22, 1999, a woman ran naked through Elephant Butte, New Mexico, with an iron collar padlocked around her neck and a chain hanging from it. Cynthia Vigil, twenty-two, had been taken three days earlier from a parking lot in Albuquerque by a man who showed her a badge, told her she was under arrest for solicitation, and put her in his car. For three days she was chained in a trailer and tortured. That morning, with the man gone to work and his girlfriend in another room, she reached the keys, and when the girlfriend hit her with a lamp she stabbed her in the neck with an icepick from the floor and ran. The man was David Parker Ray, fifty-nine, a mechanic and maintenance worker with the New Mexico state parks, and the trailer was the one he called his toy box.
Inside it police found a gynecological examination table, restraints, whips, surgical and electrical instruments, mirrors on the ceiling and pulleys, along with the fake police badge used to take Vigil and signs of her struggle. There were audio recordings in Ray's own voice, made to be played to a woman as she woke up chained, explaining calmly what would be done to her, that she was to call him Master and the woman with him Mistress, and that she would be released with no memory of it. He used drugs and hypnosis to try to make that last part true, which is one reason so few women ever came forward. A second trailer held more instruments, anatomy texts and a manual on keeping captives, and investigators found a diary they read as suggesting he had killed people.
Ray was born in Belen, New Mexico, on November 6, 1939, was largely raised by a grandfather, and married four times. He did not work alone. His girlfriend, Cynthia Hendy, confessed quickly after the arrest and told police what she knew. His daughter, Glenda, known as Jesse, and a family friend, Dennis Roy Yancy, were said to have helped him.
Two other women were identified. Angelica Montano, an acquaintance, had gone to his house to borrow a cake mix, was drugged, raped and tortured, and was left beside a highway in the desert, where police found her alive; she reported it and nothing was done. Most accounts place that attack about a month before Vigil's; some date it to 1997. Kelli Garrett was identified from a videotape dated 1996. After a fight with her husband she had gone out to play pool with friends and been drugged, prosecutors said by Glenda Ray; she was held for two days, then left by a roadside with her throat cut. She survived, the police found her story too outlandish to pursue, and her husband, believing she had been unfaithful, divorced her.
The prosecution was troubled from the start. The judge severed the three women's cases and ruled that much of what was found in the trailer, including the audio tape, could not be used in the Garrett and Montano trials, because it could not be shown that Ray had it in 1996. Hendy, who had been receiving love letters from Ray, recanted her confession; Yancy received a note warning that rats die in jail and refused to testify. Garrett's case went first, and the jury deadlocked, two jurors reportedly finding her story unbelievable. At the retrial Ray was convicted on all twelve counts. A week into the Vigil trial in 2001 he pleaded guilty to the remaining charges in exchange for his daughter's release. He was sentenced to 224 years; the FBI later gave the figure as 223. Hendy was sentenced in 2000 to thirty-six years for her part in the Vigil and Montano abductions and was released in 2019. Yancy pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to thirty years.
Ray was never charged with murder, and no victim's body was ever recovered. The figure of up to sixty killings that follows his name comes from an estimate attributed to investigators that has never been documented. In May 2002 he told authorities that he was willing to talk, in exchange for a transfer to a state prison. He died of a heart attack at the Lea County Correctional Facility in Hobbs on May 28, 2002, before the interview took place.